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This week I installed the Android Studio 3.0 preview in preparation for the development of an Android tablet app. Android Studio is based on JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDE. Google recently announced that Android Studio will support Kotlin as an official programming language for Android starting with version 3.0. The language has been designed and developed by JetBrains since 2010.

Kotlin is a language for the Java ecosystem like Scala, Groovy or Clojure that targets both the JVM and Google’s Dalvik VM, which is used for Android. It’s a statically typed language and it has a similar feature set as Scala and C#. Compared to Java it adds things like operator overloading, short syntax for properties, type inference, extension functions, string templates and it supported lambda expressions since before Java 8. But it also fixes some of Java’s inconsistencies. For example, it provides a unified type system with the Any type at the top of the type hierarchy and without special raw types. Arrays in Kotlin are invariant, and it uses declaration-site variance instead of use-site variance (see my other blog post for an explanation of these terms: Declaration-site and use-site variance explained). However, in my opinion the most interesting of Kotlin’s features is null-safety.

Null-safety

In Kotlin all types are non-nullable by default. You can’t assign null to a variable declared as

var s: String = "hi";

If you really want to be able to assign null to a variable you have to declare it with a question mark after the type, for example

var s: String? = null;

However, if you want to access a member of nullable reference or call a method on it, you have to perform a null check before doing so. This is enforced by the compiler.

if (s !=null) {
return s.toUpperCase();
}

The compiler keeps track of the null checks before accessing a member of a nullable reference. Without the check the code wouldn’t compile. Kotlin offers some additional operators to simplify these null checks, like the safe navigation operator ?. (also known from Groovy and C# 6.0) or the “Elvis” operator ?:

person?.address?.country?.name
s?.toUpperCase() ?: ""

With Kotlin’s null-safety feature NullPointerExceptions are a thing of the past.

Kotlin has a lot more to offer and we haven’t decided yet if we will use it for our new Android app project, but it’s definitely an option to consider.